You can see the trend in supermarkets everywhere—moms in aisles probing deeper and deeper into product labels. Knowing where something comes from and what it’s about is increasingly important to consumers. And a new survey says people are now more than willing to do the detective work to figure it all out.
Weber Shandwick recently surveyed consumers and business execs in the U.S., U.K., China, and Brazil and found that 70% of respondents stay away from a product if they don’t like its parent company. What’s more, transparency has become a necessity. 56% hesitate to buy a product if they can’t find information about the corporation behind it.
Though consumers and executives both agree that social and environmental responsibility are important talking points, consumers are also becoming quicker to point out the cognitive dissonances between what a brand says and what their parent corporation does.
A Fast Company story on the research singles out Kashi’s problems relating to its parent Kellogg: “One of the ingredients in Kellogg’s FiberPlus Berry Yogurt Crunch—the preservative BHT—gets a thumbs-down from Kashi’s Ingredient Decoder tool.” Can’t you just see your mom’s disapproving nod?
As customers, communities, and shareholders use new criteria to make their judgements, companies that are seen as irresponsible or creating products without purpose will get punished. And companies that get it right will get rewarded. Havas media documented that more than half of all consumers worldwide are prepared to reward responsible companies by choosing to buy their products—and that percentage keeps rising.
Of course, this reveals a huge opportunity for brands to distinguish themselves. Only 28% of consumers worldwide think that today’s companies are working hard enough to solve our social and environmental challenges.
How and where will businesses find responsible growth? Game Changers, an upcoming Wolff Olins report, looks at this issue from companies’ perspectives and highlights the key behaviors that are now shaping the future of business.
Which high-growth companies are stepping up to distinguish themselves by being both commercially and socially minded?
What will happen to brands that don’t innovate to create new value?
More to come. Stay tuned for Game Changers, coming soon to WolffOlins.com.
I’ve always said that if you design with kids in mind you just might end up designing something that everyone can understand and relate to.
This doesn’t mean dumbing down a design, but rather coming up with a strong concept, and then using all your design elements to emphasize that one idea.
Anything that doesn’t help the idea goes away!
In the end, you should have arrived at a design that either is self explanatory or explainable in one sentence that makes sense to both CEOs and kids.
Cincinnati, Ohio-based designer Adam Ladd put this theory to a test. These are his 5-year-old daughter’s first impressions of some popular logos.
Chad Mazzola of hellohappy.org has inspired us this morning. Click the image below to see his showcase of the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory.
JC Penney announced it’s new strategy on Wednesday.At a highly anticipated, star-studded presentation, new CEO Ron Johnson promised to reinvent the “6 Ps” of retail (product, place, presentation, price, promotion and personality).Will it work?
In a world of seamlessly integrated, omnichannel, open commerce platforms, critics may fault this predominately bricks & mortar approach for being old-fashioned and stuck in the past.
However, this refreshingly honest, back-to-basics approach may be just what retail needs right now – a reliable, relevant, and easy experience.
From their spirited manifesto to their tongue-in-cheek TV ads, the JCP crew seems to be very in touch with who their customer is and what they need:
·In response to a growing distrust of institutions, JC Penney’s voice is human, honest and direct
·In a world where consumers demand more transparency and authenticity, their pricing strategy is simplified and predictable
·And during a time when our nation’s role in the world is at question, their Main Street and Town Square in-store strategy conveys a distinctive American pride and point of view
If nothing else, this strategy speaks to the promise of a visionary leadership. In stark contrast to last year’s logo “bake-off” which resulted in an identity redesign from a 3rd year graphic design student, JC Penney’s new strategy is decisive and bold – not to just be America’s favorite department store, but to be America’s favorite store.
The track records of the brand architects are hard to dispute.CEO Ron Johnson, former head of retail at Apple, did the unthinkable by translating the magic of Macs and iPods into over 300 worldwide stores and transforming our expectations of a good retail experience.And President Michael Francis, former CMO of Target, built a brand that turned a Midwestern mass merchandiser into a seductive, exciting cultural tastemaker.
Beyond their credentials, the speed at which they brought the strategy to life is also a tribute to their vision and focus.Johnson’s arrival was announced in June 2011 and madeofficial in November 2011. Francis came on board in October 2011.In less than three months, they were able to crystallize their thought, mobilize a huge internal and external team of partners, and captivate the retail industry with their announcement.
Initial reactions are mixed.Stock prices fell slightly after the announcement. But if anyone can do this, Ron Johnson is a good bet.Especially since he has financial skin in the game - $50 million to lose but hundreds of millions to win.
However, success depends on a lot of “ifs.”
IF the merchandising and in-store experience can deliver on the promise of the advertising.
IF the vendor community will play by their new pricing rules.
IF the customer understands and embraces the new promotional calendar.
This will be fun to watch – if they can really pull it off, the streets will be singing their praises as prescient retail gurus. If not, sadly there will be one more once-great retail giant put out to pasture.
Time Warner is opening a 9,600-square foot media laboratory in Manhattan today, to research and analyze how people consume media and respond to advertising. Viewer-specimens will play games on iPads and watch 3D TV in a faux living room with infrared cameras that record their actions in the dark.
Time Warner and other media companies have always relied on consumer research to see how viewers might respond to new programming, but the intention with this new lab is really to partner with marketers to test how consumers experience and respond to advertising as part of today’s new media landscape. Time Warner hopes the lab’s Madison Avenue location will lure marketing partners into working with them.
So far, some big brands seem receptive. The New York Times quotes L’Oréal USA CMO Marc Speichert:
“As we continue to think about how the media landscape is changing and how to best prepare for it, having a lab down the street is extremely helpful.”
The lab costs anywhere from $50,000 for basic focus groups to $120,000 for research using biometrics. CNN and HBO are on board and marketing executives from MediaVest and WPP’s GroupM have already toured the facility.
This blog has often talked about the tidal wave of Big Data and a macrotrend we call #QuantifyMe, a recent, but persistent consumer hunger for metrics, dashboards, and data about their personal activities. For brands, being smart about Big Data is the next major challenge. In an increasingly quantifiable business world, where technology has become deeply personal, the most accurate consumer engagement and experience metrics remain a sort of holy grail of market intelligence.
Now, Time Warner’s lab can get businesses one creepy step closer. If you are a media-consuming specimen at the lab, a biometric belt and recording device will transmit your heart rate, skin temperature and facial reactions to marketers and researchers, so they can decipher your “engagement” as you watch TV, play a video game, or swipe through a branded iPad app. In other rooms, your eye movements will be tracked and a two-way mirror will be used to look over your shoulder as you browse the web or make selections in a fake grocery store.
Some have raised that Manhattan’s heartbeats and sweat might not represent the best cross section of American consumers. Then again, maybe the new methods are enough to put traditional focus groups and industry research to shame.
The lab is so new, we’re yet to see reporting of any great insights or projects it’s inspired. Ok Time Warner, we’re watching you…
With yesterday’s formal introduction of new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, the Canadian smartphone maker has officially declared the start of its uphill battle with the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The most valuable weapon in this fight? Brand. Here’s why.
A decade ago, Blackberries were only ever seen clipped to the belt loops of corporate suits. Blackberries meant business and all of RIM’s research, products, and marketing were focused around that idea. Superior product specs ultimately drove sales.
But then America entered the “crackberry” era. As RIM’s smartphones grew more mainstream —the result of blurring lines between leisure and business, otherwise known as #Bleisure— more and more people became familiar with the technology. Then demand moved beyond professionals as everyone from college students to teenagers with delusions of grandeur started adopting Blackberries. (I remember my teenage sister begging our parents for one, even composing a handwritten argument detailing all the ways the phone would ostensibly improve her life).
RIM had trouble truly reacting to the new expectations of these shifting audiences: WORK + PLAY, UTILITY + FASHION. While the company released new phones to try to feed the momentum, their internal culture was still rooted in the past, hindering their understanding of what people wanted from their technology. Without a clear position in this new world, Blackberry didn’t stand a chance of making the best future-led phones for anyone.
Meanwhile, their new breed of customer had little connection to the brand beyond its product. Many fled when shinier phones emerged from brands that represented a specific lifestyle choice and communicated social capital. Apple = sexy design. Android = geek chic. As a result, RIM continued to lose smartphone market share and their shares fell 75% in 2011.
If RIM is to keep the Blackberry from going down as a pop-culture fad of the 2000s, they’ll have figure out what makes it unique in the eyes of their new buyer and thoroughly embrace that spirit. They need to determine what RIM now stands for (figuratively), inside and out. And they need a reason to exist in this new world, where people of all ages are increasingly mobile and connected.
If this vision is solidified and shared, RIM will be able to innovate with a purpose. They’ll start to build a product ecosystem with features that people can’t live without and over time, their authentic brand will resonate. Only then will RIM have set the Blackberry back in motion.
(This is the first in a monthly series of trend posts by WONY StrategistEmily Segal. You’ll see Wolff Olins’ established macrotrends called out with a hashtag.)
#The Internet of Things
What it is:
Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk fiction writer and prophet of the #Internet of Things, coined the portmanteau “Spime” in 2004, as a thought experiment.
“In July, Mexico’s attorney general became a smart object. Rafael Macedo de la Concha had an RFID chip implanted in his arm that can track and authenticate him…Of course, it’s his brain that makes him smart. It’s the chip that makes him an object: cataloged, searchable, and locatable in space and time. The same kind of upgrade is happening to brainless devices, tools, toys, and doodads all around us, creating a world that is Googleable. Ordinary items are being embedded with rudimentary communications and tied to databases….The future product that embodies these developments will be so radically different from today’s that it will need an entirely new name. So let’s give it one. Because it’s tracked precisely in space and time, let’s call it a spime.”
Now, just a few years later, the formerly science fiction vision of a ubiquitous network through which everyday objects embedded with chips, sensors, and “smarts”communicate information by themselves – is becoming an inexpensive mainstream reality.
According to a 2011 Cisco study, the number of devices connected to the internet last year outnumbered people on earth in 2008. Among these devices are the #Internet of Things – not Kindle Fires but microwaves, jewelry, and livestock that communicate autonomously, without human intervention. The way this is heading is the creation of ambient intelligence through mapping, tagging, and data gathering of regular stuff.
McKinsey describes the range of networked objects: “Pill-shaped microcameras already traverse the human digestive tract and send back thousands of images to pinpoint sources of illness. Precision farming equipment with wireless links to data collected from remote satellites and ground sensors can take into account crop conditions and adjust the way each individual part of a field is farmed—for instance, by spreading extra fertilizer on areas that need more nutrients.”
Examples:
The recently launched Twine is a little internet-connected box with censors for moisture, temperature, and vibration, with a dead-simple interface that lets you set it to text, email, or tweet you whenever it notices that your dog bowl is dry, your dryer’s stopped vibrating, your pipes are about to freeze (or whatever your heart desires).
WHEN current rises above 1A for 90 minutes THEN email “The kids have watched enough TV today.”
WHEN Bedside Lamp is turned off THEN tweet “Goodnight, John-Boy.”
Designed by MIT Media Lab alums David Carr and John Kestner, the Twine was a Kickstarter superstar, raising $556,541 on a $35,000 goal (the third largest Kickstarter campaign ever).
At $99 and built to be hacked/customized, it’s a bellwether of the #Internet of Things to come.
Twine also engages the trend #QuantifyMe: consumer hunger for metrics, dashboards, and data about their personal activities. As Nanveet Alang writes in a piece on Twine in the Toronto Standard: “I’d love to have a record of how many times I opened the fridge in the last two weeks of December (my guess: 9000).”
CES was teeming with new products that are part of this trend (though many of which seem woefully specific when compared to Twine):
·Samsung is offering awashing machine and dryerwhich is Wi-Fi enabled and can be controlled from inside or outside your home.
·Xperia SmartTagsareNFCchips that you can stick throughout your home and program with different actions and settings. When you enter the room and tap your phone to the SmartTags, your phone will automatically adjust to the profile you created.
What does this mean for business?
·New metrics: being able to instantly answer how many people laid on a particular mattress at Sleepy’s, as compared to how many people bought it, mean that engagement measurement can get a lot more granular, if not straight-up invasive
·New semantic search engines: ease for customers looking for particular objects, the next step in the vein of apps like Aisle411
·New accountability: “Hackers, activists, advocates, competitors, designers – all of us – can query the data-stream to find out what, for example, happens to the high-impact rubber on our sneakers’ soles at the end of their life – are they being recycled into schoolyard playgrounds or are they becoming aerosol carcinogens?”
Images via spime.org, usc.edu, mediacup.teco.edu
Few of us have problems talking to new people at parties, meeting friends of friends or connecting to people with more than two degrees of separation on Facebook. So why are so many of us uncomfortable with doing this at work?
Networking is fundamental to our working lives: just as the lines between work and personal have become blurred, so are the lines between doing your day job and growing your business. Yet many of us hold back from getting out and doing it: a discomfort with coming across as salesy, a worry that we will say something stupid or, worse, ‘off brand’ with the company we work for.
Well, I can dispel all three myths: firstly networking is not about selling it’s about making connections: making friends and maybe eventually (or tomorrow) influencing them or being influenced by them. Secondly, if you are meeting someone for the first time, then they are also meeting you for the first time. We are all interesting if we are first interested. In other words, it’s not about you it’s about them. And finally, people are meeting you, not your business, and if you talk about what you do it’s best to talk about it in a way that feels natural to you, rather than recite the company’s elevator pitch (the quickest way to clear the room).
Still worried?
Why not start with who you know already and work from there: at a Wolff Olins workshop earlier this week I asked everyone to spend a few minutes writing down 10 people who could be useful contacts: not just potential clients, but people who might be great information providers, potential recruits or referees. It look most people less than 90 seconds to create their list, and another 5 minutes to think up good reasons to re-connect with them without feeling forced or uncomfortable.
And as for meeting new people to add to your network – and conferences are usually ripe territory for this – there are some useful things to remember which should make the process painless.
Enjoy yourself
You really will get more out of it. If you go in with a card-collecting agenda it is likely to colour the way you behave and prevent you from making a connection with people. As long as you remember to pick up a delegate list you can afford to relax, as you can then always look people up later
Listen and respond to what is being said
By concentrating too hard on what you are going to say next you could miss useful signals from those you are talking to.
All connections are worthwhile
Go with a positive mindset. The person in the coffee queue with you may not be a potential client now or ever, but they could be a valuable connection (as could you to them).
Treat others as you would like to be treated
If a conversation is really going nowhere, try bringing others into the group or introduce your companion to someone else before making a polite excuse to leave.
People like to work with people they like. And it all starts with a conversation.
It’s too soon to know if Kodak’s Chapter 11 filing is the final death knell for the iconic brand, but the news is a timely reminder of the link between innovation and brand longevity.
Kodak’s heritage is rooted in innovation, and their best products became part of our lives in a deeply emotional way. However, Kodak’s failure to innovate goes beyond their inability to recognize the rise of digital imaging and their ill-fated foray into printers.
Their failure was one of imagination. An inability to understand that product, like brand itself, is a living idea. When you buy a product, what you’re really buying is the ability to do something. The brand is both a projection and a reflection of what that ability is and what it means in your world. Product, construed as ability, is form agnostic, and should not just adapt to, but also anticipate changes in how people will want to access and use that ability.
Kodak, like Blockbuster, Borders and others, failed to imagine product beyond product.
Now Kodak is forced to pursue ever more desperate measures to raise cash, like selling its patents, which will take it even farther away from the pioneering spirit that built the brand.
At its core, Kodak helped us see—and remember—our world. It helped us tell the story of ourselves. This is a remarkable and timeless role for a brand to play, but with Kodak’s growing gap between brand and product, the company itself may soon be a memory.
The ironies of Kodak’s bankruptcy are kind of limitless: Kodak is a classic example of a one-time giant getting outpaced by the technologies it helped invent (in this case, the digital camera).
Kodak hasn’t been profitable since 2007, having switched its focus from photography to printers (making the world-historical mistake of picking the physical over the virtual). The rest of Kodak’s value rests in the patents it owns related to digital imaging, which the company says are used in virtually every modern digital camera, smartphone and tablet.
But the demise of Kodak is also a brand tragedy.
Kodak invented a new kind of memory. It was a brand capable of freezing the present and reprinting the past.
The memories Kodak stood for were both personal – as immortalized in the famous Paul Simon song– and national – Neil Armstrong used Kodak to take the first pictures from the moon, and 80 films shot on Kodak film have won Oscars for Best Picture.
When it invented the handheld camera, Kodak created a sweet new strain of independence.
Now, that brand equity has become a soup of chemicalsand patents. Still, Polaroid bounced back after its 2001 bankruptcy, and Kodak might also find new ways to develop.
You can see a lot today in the things you can’t see.
We compiled some of the best SOPA blackouts we’ve encountered this morning. Check them out and let us know what we’ve missed—we’ll add your suggestions right away. Comment here or tweet some others at @wolffolins.
And thanks, open source internet, for letting us legally compile these:
